German forces released a cloud of chlorine gas over the Belgian town of Ypres on the 28th of May 1915. This event marked the first large-scale use of poison gas in modern warfare and initiated a frantic race between opposing armies to develop more potent chemicals.
Werner Heisenberg led a civilian-controlled group investigating nuclear bombs by 1942. A military-led unit commanded by Kurt Diebner received significantly more funding but failed to produce a weapon before the war ended.
The Whirlwind-SAGE program aimed to create an automated radar shield for national defense through virtually unlimited funds over two decades. The final version of the SAGE command and control system possessed only marginal military utility despite this effort.
Virtually all funding for American geodesy came from the Department of Defense during several decades. In the 1960s, geodesy served as the superficial goal of the satellite program CORONA while military reconnaissance drove actual operations.
Historian Paul Forman published a seminal article in 1987 proposing that military funding initiated a qualitative change in the purposes and character of American physics. His distortionist critique focused subsequent debates on whether this influx fundamentally redirected science toward applied research or merely expanded its scope.